


95816

by Hannah



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Post-Canon, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26827135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: Six months in, reality hits.
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers
Comments: 8
Kudos: 38





	95816

**Author's Note:**

> [](https://imgur.com/828iIdO)  
>   
> -
> 
> Thanks to [andtheyfightcrime](https://www.archiveofourown.org/users/andtheyfightcrime/) and [Yellowb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowb) for cheerleading, [actiaslunaris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VesperRegina/pseuds/actiaslunaris), [angelic_amy](https://dark-solace.org/elysian/viewuser.php?uid=2), [Niamh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niamh/pseuds/Niamh), and [Sandy_S](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandy_s/pseuds/sandy_s) for beta-reading, and [DirtyAim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DirtyAim/profile) for making me such a wonderful banner.
> 
> While the house used in the story and the banner is real - [3800 S Street, Sacramento, CA, 95816](h) \- its placement and surroundings have been modified slightly to be a little more dramatic.

Rain in March was a soft, gentle creature. It slid in quietly, working so lightly as to hardly be noticed. More like fast, heavy mist, it stayed all day and throughout the night, and landed so faint against the window Buffy almost couldn’t hear it. She tried rolling over to see it better, but something was weighing her down, blocking her movements, freezing her in fear.

Then the baby hiccupped, and she relaxed.

Not a stroke or an aneurism or sudden paralysis. Just her belly getting in her way.

“Ah,” she breathed, as the baby started really going for it. She didn’t know if she’d prefer a night kicker or not. Maybe they would be, as the weeks rolled by, and she’d look back on the weightless, jerking hiccups as the halcyon days of the second trimester. She was already looking back on the heavy hunger of the first trimester with a weird fondness. A deep interest in most foods beat a heavy fixation on just a few things to the exclusion of all alternatives, leaving her impatiently waiting to remember how to enjoy chicken teriyaki again.

The baby kept hiccupping until they finished, not tapering off so much as suddenly stopping. Maybe something surprised them. Maybe unborn babies could start and stop hiccupping the way most people could snap their fingers. Or maybe they fell asleep. Could’ve been anything happening deep in there. 

Buffy grunted under her breath, got her elbows beneath her, and flipped over as best she could, hitting the bed with a minor _thwump_. And she lay there. Not breathing hard. Just breathing.

It wasn’t a surprise that she was pregnant. It was pretty much the least surprising pregnancy she could’ve had, except for all the ordinary surprises that came with being pregnant. Like how the baby had the hiccups instead of her, like having honest-to-God shampoo commercial hair without even trying, like the sense of smell that kept walloping her every time she picked out the most perfectly ripe fruit from the otherwise identical-looking ones in the market boxes.

Like having to think about how to turn over.

The baby flipped around, giving her a lurch, then settled down.

“Tease me, why don’t you,” she breathed out, barely a whisper.

She lay there, the sheets light and the blankets heavy, her body occupied in exactly the same way it’d been two hours ago and completely differently than how it’d been just five minutes earlier, and holy merciful heavens, she was pregnant and going to be a mother.

She’d wanted this pregnancy more than she’d wanted pretty much everything else in her life, and she still wanted the baby more than anything else in the world. She just hadn’t really _felt_ pregnant until tonight.

Hadn’t really _known_ she was going to have a baby. Hadn’t really felt the inevitability of what was coming, with no getting out of it anymore. 

Groaning quietly, she maneuvered up onto her elbows, shimmied to the edge of the bed, pushed herself to her feet, and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain just a bit to check out how much she couldn’t see. Between the rain and the night, the front yard was as dark as it’d ever been, and with as few streetlamps as their block had, she couldn’t even easily make out the other side of the street. A small residential street, where their two-bedroom one-bathroom five-room place didn’t stand out as anything particularly flashy or humble. They had a little over a thousand square feet on a little over a tenth of an acre, small and cozy with enough room for things to get untidy. Perfect for a family of three. Just another little house in an ordinary town of a city.

It was one of those things that’d made everyone they knew laugh. Because of course she and Spike would settle in _sacrament._

There’d been things she hadn’t much care about for where she’d have the baby, things she’d wanted if convenient, things she’d known had to be there. She and Spike had sat down and spent a full evening going over deciding factors, important aspects, necessary qualities, and the only one she hadn’t budged on was that the city had to be in California. When Wesley, Willow, and Giles came back with a short list of cities with generally low levels of mystical activity and plenty of options for mothers-to-be, Sacramento was at the top. So Sacramento it was.

Even if she wasn’t doing any slaying, it wasn’t like there was nothing to do in Sacramento. The car museum was plenty of fun, especially with Spike giving her a personalized tour. She could wander the farmers’ markets and try all the free samples and buy the absolute best citrus fruit the world had to offer. The zoo had tickets for late evening hours she made sure to buy weeks ahead of time. And there was always something to do to get ready for June: paint the walls, scrub the floors, ward the windows, attend all the regular check-ups at the birthing center with the midwives who’d been with her and Spike since week nine, ask the salesman to disassemble and reassemble the supposedly very easy crib right there in the baby store and be pleasantly surprised to find that it lived up to its reputation.

Hurry up and wait.

“Hey there,” Spike said quietly from just behind her. She reached out and he put his hands in hers. She guided them around to her belly, and he left them where she put them, down and low around the sides. He could splay them out and cover most of her belly, and that’d be changing soon, too. “Bad dreams?”

“Not really.” It’d been unpleasant ones of trying to make sense of a book she didn’t really remember, her brain coming up with the plot of something she’d only seen summarized a while back. It’d left her restless when she opened her eyes. “You?”

“Not much in the way of dreams tonight,” he said, rubbing her lower stomach gently. She could feel the shift and press of his hands under hers. “Baby busy in there?”

“They were,” she answered, and then went cold, going stiff. A thought she couldn’t give words to suddenly rang clear in her mind.

“Buffy?” Spike asked. Poised readiness and total calmness: predatory, parental, pregnant partner behavior. “Love?”

She shook her head, lacing her fingers through his. She tried to sort the words out, one by one. “There’s a baby,” she said quietly.

“That there is.”

“There’s a _baby.”_

“As we well know.”

“I mean, there’s a baby coming.” She twisted around to look at him. “I mean, I’m pregnant.” She tried again, “There’s – I’m going to have a baby.”

“Not arguing with that.” In the dark, she could make out the shape of him, the near-glowing pale skin, the bright bleached bedhead hair. His voice was gentle and light, full of affection and joy. “Facts of the matter, an’ nothing more.” 

He stood with her, the two of them listening to the drops hit the window, the wall, the front lawn. They stood and listened until she finally let go, padding off to the bathroom to do her business and not bothering to turn on the light. Hands washed, back in the bedroom, she settled down gently, rolling onto her side. Spike lay facing her, his hand reaching out to touch her belly again. Her shirt had ridden up, and she pulled it the rest of the way to reveal the entirety of her stomach, letting him put a hand that was cool as the sheets against her warm skin.

“Oh,” Buffy said in surprise. “There we go.”

“Hey there, sweetheart,” Spike said softly as the baby started kicking, Buffy’s hand joining his on her belly. Too small to see, big enough to feel from the inside and outside, the baby starting to stretch their legs and arms and get their feet moving in the safe and comfortable uterus while there was still enough space to really spread out and get some good kicking in.

The baby quieted down after a few minutes. Buffy and Spike stayed silent the whole way through.

She looked at his face, indistinct in the near-dark. Not hazy, not illusionary. She didn’t need to see the shape of his mouth or gaze into his eyes to tell how he was feeling, not when she could take in the slope of his shoulder or feel the way he was gently stroking the skin on her stomach.

Buffy watched Spike – his forearm, the lines of his body, the tilt of his head – as he marveled, new and strange every time, at the baby. Her pregnancy wouldn’t last much longer, compared to how long it’d already been. More intense, sure. But not much longer. And when it was over…when it was done, there’d be a baby. She’d be a mother, Spike would be a father, and there’d be a baby. A baby was coming, and there wasn’t any getting away from that. She’d known she’d have a baby for six months now, but having a hard time rolling over made her _really_ know that.

Spike continued to stroke her stomach with his thumb. She tucked her hands under her pillow and watched him, the curve of his cheek more than enough to show her his wonder and joy. She could imagine their child in his arms, their hands in his. Their baby growing up with a Slayer for a mother and a vampire for a father. Their baby, growing up.

“You’re going to outlive them.” The words fell out of her mouth, unbidden, unasked for, and his hand froze. He was unmoving and cold against her with the inescapable future now brought into being for Buffy having spoken the words aloud, trapping them in the events that’d someday come to pass. That he’d someday bury their child. “Whoever they are – if this goes the way it should, you and the baby, and you and me, and the three of us, it’s going…our family. The baby. Whoever they are, they’re going to grow up, and you’re going to outlive them.”

He lay there, cooler than a cucumber and quieter than a library, and Buffy usually knew how to read his stillness. But right then there was too much stillness to get a read on it. When he went still all over, she could only guess.

Then his hand moved. Just his hand, and nothing else, and Buffy understood.

“I know,” he said, and kept with the hand on her belly. He sighed, the deliberate inhalation and exhalation from his lungs like a bellows, and he did it again, the puff of chilly air over her bare stomach making her shiver, but the baby staying safe and warm inside. Safe and warm and waiting. But not ready. Not yet. She and Spike wouldn’t ever be ready, but they were going to get as ready as they could be.

“Three more months,” he said quietly.

“Three more months,” Buffy echoed, her hand on his. She closed her eyes, letting her mind drift away with the rain in the air and her family close around her. Even with everything she knew was coming, as much as she wanted to meet their baby, three more months wasn’t long to wait. Not long at all.


End file.
